【Ten Years of Great Progress in Chemical Technology】From 2014 to 2020, domestic refineries used by-product hydrogen for the first time to produce high-purity \"59\" hydrogen

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On September 23, 2020, the first high-purity hydrogen production demonstration unit, featuring Sinopec’s own intellectual property, was successfully put into operation at the Shanghai Gaqiao Petrochemical Complex. This device uses hydrogen produced as a by-product of low-cost oil refining processes as raw material to produce high-quality hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles. For the first time in China, hydrogen generated as a by-product of refineries has been purified to 99.999%, which is well above the 99.97% standard required for hydrogen used in fuel cell vehicles. The cost of hydrogen is one of the bottlenecks to the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles. Currently, the main methods for hydrogen production in China are water electrolysis, hydrogen production from fossil fuels, and hydrogen generated as a by-product of industrial processes. Compared to other hydrogen production methods, hydrogen produced as a by-product is widely encountered in the manufacturing processes of products in industries such as oil refining and chemicals; it offers advantages such as low cost and abundant availability. However, its purity is low and its composition is complex, making it a challenge for the industry to meet the stringent standards required for hydrogen used in fuel cell vehicles. To this end, Sinopec formed a joint research team comprising its Dalian (Fushun) Petrochemical Research Institute, Guangzhou (Luoyang) Engineering Company, and Takahashi Petrochemical. Using hydrogen produced as a by-product of low-cost refining processes as raw material, they developed a complete set of technologies for producing high-quality hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells, and successfully carried out industrial demonstrations to purify hydrogen with a purity of around 90% to 99.999% in just one step.